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Building the whole Debian archive with GCC 4.1: a summary

Posted Mar 28, 2006 10:42 UTC (Tue) by amcrae (subscriber, #25501)
In reply to: Building the whole Debian archive with GCC 4.1: a summary by philips
Parent article: Building the whole Debian archive with GCC 4.1: a summary

>Thou as I heard infamous WLAN of theirs still got no public documentation... Go figure.
The Broadcom CPU folks are an acquisition (Sibyte originally). I had many dealings with them both pre and post acquisition, and the CPU folks have always had a strong open source policy. This is, of course, only sensible when you are trying to establish a CPU product in a mostly embedded market.
As opposed to WLAN chips aimed at a PC market.
The fact that the CPU stuff was an acquisition is probably the source of the different policies. It can surprise some people that large/largish companies can have seemingly conflicting policies with different products, but it does often happen.

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MIPS CPUs from Broadcom

Posted Mar 28, 2006 11:17 UTC (Tue) by tbm (subscriber, #7049) [Link]

Actually, it's a little bit more tricky than that. Broadcom has two different MIPS based lines. There's the SB1 core which, like you said, comes from SiByte. These target the higher end networking range, e.g. switches. There's the 1250 CPU with 2 cores and the 1480 with 4 cores. These chips are really expensive so you don't find them in any consumer devices.

Additionally, there's their low-end CPU line, the 47xx/5xxx line. These run at 150-300 MHz, are very cheap and you can find them everywhere, e.g. in lots of wireless routers. Some of these devices will make an excellent platform to run Debian on.

While the SB1 people at Broadcom get it, the same doesn't apply to the latter group (which, apparently, isn't just one group, but split again into different groups depending on the market segment they focus on). SB1 support is fairly well done and integrated into mainline, but the 47xx/5xxx support is based on 2.4 and is the usual badly hacked support which cannot be integrated (lots of platform independent code so you can share it between Linux and other OSes, files with unclear copyright statements). It's a big mess.

The OpenWRT people have started on a 2.6 implementation but it still includes quite a bit of the Broadcom code and therefor cannot be integrated into the kernel. Yet... my evil plan is to get Thiemo Seufer, a MIPS hacker and Debian developer, and some other hackers one of those routers and then they'll hopefully fix up the code and get it merged into the kernel.

I tried contacting the 47xx/5xxx people at Broadcom but have failed so far. The SB1 people also don't seem to have very good contacts with them. The problem of big corporations, I guess. But I'll continue trying...

MIPS CPUs from Broadcom

Posted Mar 28, 2006 17:11 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

If it helps you at all in your efforts for there to be a conference about doing hardware support the Linux way, and the ease and advantages thereof, please feel free to put yourself down for FreedomHEC and invite your Broadcom contacts too. The "year without a Christmas" is the perfect time to reach hardware people, IMHO.

MIPS CPUs from Broadcom

Posted Mar 28, 2006 17:12 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I think it is a problem with any group of more than 100 people that does not have good internal communication tables. I have seen so many times where 3 groups will do exactly the same project but did not communicate it until they were ready to produce it which usually meant that all 3 would then get into a fight about how to do it best... trying to put them onto the same lists usually resulted in the same lovefests that you see when you stick OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and NetBSD people on the same list (or say KDE and Gnome people). Sometimes it works out but the core philosophies/values that some people have are hard to get past.